Wild Times in Mizu-Tokyo

My Final Project for my Climate Change Fiction class involves making my own cli-fi novel. I will do a close reading analysis of the first chapter of my cli-fi novel, “Wild Times in Mizu-Tokyo”.

The story itself takes place in the year 2117, about 50 years after the loss of the polar ice caps, causing the flooding of most coastal areas around the globe. Japan has rebuilt itself into a collection of city-states. Mizu-Tokyo is the most developed of these city states. However, it is also the most crime ridden witha government that is very corrupt. The plot revolves around a young man named Tadashi Arakawa. He is a member of one of the three Yakuza crime syndicates in Mizu-Tokyo, each of which has taken their own chunk of the city. Tadashi has his hands full not only with trying to keep himself alive in an rapidly encroaching gang war, but also with acting as a mentor/bodyguard to his boss’s son and heir.

I got this idea near the beginning of the first few weeks of this winter term. After reading quite a few climate change short stories, I wondered what would happen if a larger, more complex climate change fiction story was written. I also wanted to see how cli-fi would mix with the other literary genres out there. This story for instance, is mainly a crime/drama novel. However, it does have plenty of cli-fi elements in the story, even if they play out in the background.

An example of this is found in the first chapter of my story. In this part, Tadashi is observing the style of his boss’s main meeting office. “He took in the old-fashioned style of the room; the hand-sliding door instead of the automatic, the walls made of wood instead of metal or concrete, the short wooden table with the little sitting pillows on each style, the bamboo floor underneath his bare feet. This was old-school. As in feudal, samurai-and-ninjas old school. This was going out of style in Japan long before the Daikōzui (Great Flood) hit. Only a handful of people in Mizu-Tokyo followed the old ways. The Oyabun was one of them.”

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